20 years of Holden & Partners, reflections from one of our founding partners, Tim Cosway
Cast your mind back 20 years. Elton John was in the charts for a second time with ‘Are You Ready for Love’, it was the year of the Arsenal Invincibles with their 49 unbeaten game streak and of course, it was the year of the war with Iraq.
This was also the year when our founding partners left their roles in a financial advice firm that had been sold to a big bank in a wave of consolidation in the industry. They were disillusioned that their trailblazing stance on Ethical Investment (what we now know as Ethical, Sustainable and Governance (ESG) Investment) would be abandoned by their now much larger parent company, and that the personal client relationships they had forged would suffer.
Holden & Partners was born and flash forward 20 years, we are now a team of more than 30 with 1,000 clients. We got together in London to reminisce about the early days and make plans for the future.
Success was far from guaranteed from day one. Around 20% of companies fail within their first year, a figure that rises to 60% within the first three years.1 A sobering statistic. Before we turned our attention to plans for the future, partner Tim Cosway talked the team through the reasons he believes that Holden & Partners flourished when others failed to take flight:
1. We were ahead of our time.
20 years ago, setting up our stall as an ethical and fee-based firm was different. Establishing ourselves as an ESG firm means that everything about our business is built on those foundations, it is not something we have had to integrate into our company retrospectively like so many firms today.
The industry move to a fee-based model came about largely with the Retail Distribution Review (RDR) in 2012, but we had already been working in this way for nearly ten years.
2. We’ve always tried to improve
It’s one thing to be ahead of your time when you start out, but if you don’t look to continuously improve then you will quickly lose your edge. We are constantly looking for ways to get better, whether that’s at a firm level and implementing a new platform that will benefit clients, or the individual development plans our employees have, resulting in our team being one of the most qualified groups of individuals in the industry.
3. We value loyalty and commitment
The length of service of our people is something worth celebrating, it means that we are building an enduring culture and that the relationships we build with clients are for the long term. Maybe one of the best indicators is that we have people who have left and then come back, which is a great endorsement of the culture we have here that it is hard to find elsewhere.
The rest of the day turned to plans for the future and how the next twenty years will shape up, so watch this space!
1. https://www.nerdwallet.com/uk/business/start-up-failure-statistics/